Angle of Repose (40 page)

“Thee could, I know thee could.” She lay still, then she said, “That’s almost the first thing thee ever said to me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was drawing in the library at the Beaches’. Thee said It must be nice to do what you like and get paid for it.”’

“All right, I don’t take it back. Look at Emmons, as relaxed about Leadville as if he didn’t give a hoot what goes on in it, or who owns what, and yet he practically made it. Everybody in the place, even the pick and shovel man at the end of a drift, consults his book. That ought to make a man feel good.”

“What would Frank and Pricey do?”

“They could have the office. Frank’s got a degree from MIT, which is more than I’ve got. He could handle it right now.”

“I’d hate to see them left out, they both admire thee so.”

“I’ll see they’re not left out.”

His hands were moving on her. Often, when he was in that mood, she put them away, but now she let them come under the nightgown, all over her. She laughed a little because there was no room for his elbows, it was like making love inside a culvert. “I love thee,” she said, and kissed him all over his face. “Does thee mind? I love thee even if thee isn’t a talker.”

“I don’t mind a bit.”

“Now can we bring Ollie? Can we start the ell tomorrow?”

“First things first,” Oliver said through his teeth. He helped her to sit up, he stripped the nightgown over her head and exposed her in the wash of bluish light. As if she were infinitely precious and infinitely fragile, he touched her. She had the feeling that he was afraid she might pop like a soap bubble.

“King’s right,” he said with his lips against the parting between her breasts. “Who am I to deserve this?”

“Thee deserves everything. More than everything.” Her desire to touch and be touched was so strong that she feared he might be repelled. She felt wanton and wild, she couldn’t get enough of his mouth. “I love thee,” she said. “Oh, darling, I do love thee, I do, I do!”

Shelly’s stay as my house guest, or perhaps the fact that I have had a look into her private life and she has had a glimpse of me being cared for like an infant by her mother, has led her to adopt a more familiar tone with me than I quite like. She acts as if she had been employed as confidential adviser, keeper, critic, teaching assistant, and lay psychiatrist. I can see her “studying” me and drawing conclusions. I suppose my routines
are
pretty dull, and I shouldn’t be surprised that she exercises herself interpreting her boss. Which is no reason she should feel free to talk to the boss about her half-assed interpretations. And I made the mistake of having her type up all the tapes that I was sure contained no personal matter. I would have been better advised to keep her from seeing any of the book.

This afternoon, after she got through typing some of the Leadville chapters, she asked me if I didn’t think I was being a little inhibited about my grandparents’ sex life. “Because it’s a novel,” she says. “It isn’t history–you’re making half of it up, and if you’re going to make up some of it, why not go the whole way? I mean, it’s tantalizing. You get close to dealing with their sex life, and blip, you turn off the light. Two or three times. Once on the honeymoon, once at Santa Cruz, now once in Leadville.”

“I may look to you like a novelist, but I’m still a historian under the crust,” I said. “I stick with the actual. That’s what
they
would have done, turned off the light.”

“I
know,
all that business about never seeing your wife naked. They were so puritan about their bodies in those days, it was bound to have screwed up their minds. Can you leave out anything that basic and still have a valid book? Modern readers might find a study of the Victorian sex life interesting and funny.”

I felt like asking her, if contemporary sexual attitudes are so much healthier than Grandmother’s, how Grandmother managed to get through a marriage that lasted more than sixty years, while Shelly Rasmussen hides out in her parents’ house at the age of twenty or so to escape the attentions of her liberated and natural lover. But I only said, “Interesting in what way? Funny how?”

I suppose because she has worn pants much of her student life, she feels free to sprawl on the back of her neck, with her worn loafers stretched halfway across the room. From where I sat in the dormer I could see her studying me through her hair, getting all ready for one of those open-hearted open-ended rap sessions that the young have adapted from the David Susskind show and learned to call education. They can go on for hours, and reveal all. Combined with encounter techniques they can empty the well and cleanse the soul and bore the hell out of anybody over twenty-five. The afternoon light was in her squarish face. She squinted shrewdly, she burbled with her hoarse laughter. “Well, it couldn’t have been all that decorous, could it? They had sex with their eyes shut so they could pretend everything was on a high plane. Aren’t hypocritical people sort of funny?”

It happens that I despise that locution “having sex,” which describes something a good deal more mechanical than making love and a good deal less fun than fucking. Also I don’t think anybody’s sex life, Grandmother’s included, very funny, unless you mean funny-peculiar, and Shelly didn’t mean that. She meant funny-ha-ha, funny-hypocritical, funny-absurd. I had imagined that Leadville love scene, exceeding my license as a historian, because I felt that just then she was fighting against her ingrown gentility and snobbery, ashamed of herself for having been ashamed of her husband, and making contrite and affectionate amends. I had meant that scene to be tender. I meant it to clear away, at least for the time, all the cobwebs. I wanted it to shine the windows and polish the tarnished feelings like a good spring house cleaning. Which I have known a good love scene to do.

So I replied pretty sharply, “I wouldn’t know. One of the quaint things about the Victorian sex life was that it was private. I doubt that they replayed every hand and rehashed all their honor count and playing tricks. They didn’t have all these compulsions to verbalize, they didn’t appear to get a sexual thrill out of words. The fact is, I haven’t the slightest idea how good a lay Grandmother was. I have no idea–yes, I do too, but not from anything she said or wrote–how she looked upon
fellatio
and the other delights. Is that what you miss?”

I jarred her. She looked like a dog that had just for the hell of it barked at a stone dog on a lawn, and been barked back at. In spite of that bass-baritone and that air of amused assurance, she is definitely female. She might under some circumstances be submissive, like these dreary girls you see padding along in the moccasin tracks of hippies. Had she been one of those? For a few seconds I entertained the possibility.

She blinked, but within a second she had recovered the ironic widening smile and the ironic glance of the gray eye. She shrugged up her shoulders, obviously just
enjoying
this discussion no end. “I didn’t mean, emancipate her from all her hangups. That wouldn’t be historically sound, would it? I just meant, couldn’t you give us a little more of the
scene,
then we’d understand all these artificial restraints for what they are.”

“What are they?”

“What are they? Conventions. Restraints. Inhibitions. Hangups.”

“Which of course she operated by. She had them. Her society had them.”

“But you could cut through them!” Shelly said. All eager to instruct me, she sat forward. “There are hints in the letters that give her away. She tells Augusta once that ‘that incorrigible shyness has passed,’ and another time she says, ‘Between my husband and me things are
all right,’
underlined. You could extrapolate from hints like that.”

“Please,” I said. “You’ve been taking courses in these jargon pseudo-sciences that my son teaches. If I extrapolated, as you suggest, the resulting sex scenes would be mine, not hers. She valued her privacy, she would never in this life have extrapolated. Neither would I. I would no more extrapolate in public than I would go to the bathroom on the parlor rug.”

That brought out her big
ho ho ho
. She rocked forward, her hair fell over her breast and she threw it back with that irritating gesture. She was right where she wanted to be, digging up the roots of things, exposing all the shameful shams.

“That’s what I was
telling
you. It’s
your
inhibitions that are showing, not hers. I suppose she did have them, but that’s no reason you have to, in 1970. We’ve learned to accept things, and the words for things, and be honest about the way we are. We don’t need those purely cultural patterns of convention. Did you hear what you just said? ‘Go to the bathroom.’ Why?”

“Because I never learned to say shit before a lady,” I said, thoroughly irritated. “Because I don’t believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I’d rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.”

She is not utterly insensitive. She looked at me with her head tipped to one side, and said with her mouth pulled down, “I’ve made you mad.”

“Not personally,” I said. “Just culturally.”

The way I was sitting, talking at an angle, I was aimed at Grandmother’s portrait, pensive and downcast in the cool light that flooded the wall covered with letters from people she had admired and been admired by. “Look at her picture,” I said. “What’s in that face? Hypocrisy? Dishonesty? Prudery? Timidity? Or discipline, self-control, modesty? Modesty, there’s a word 1970 can’t even conceive. Is that a woman I want to show making awkward love on a camp cot? Do you want to hear her erotic cries? Is that a woman to snicker at because she was a lady, and fastidious?”

“I didn’t mean that, exactly. I was just thinking from the point of view of the modern reader. He might think you were ducking something essential.”

“That’s too bad. Hasn’t the modern reader got any imagination?”

“Well,
you
know. People nowadays understand things, they can sniff out the dishonesty when somebody tries to cover something up or leave it to the imagination. How would it be if every modern novel did it like Paolo and Francesca–‘That day they read no more’?”

“O.K., so I haven’t fooled you with my dishonest methods,” I said. “Just leave me there with old hypocritical Dante.”

“Oh, you know what I mean!” she said, and slid off her chair to sit cross-legged on the floor. “Times change! Like, people have got
tired
of all that covering up. You see kids who just throw off their clothes, they want to break down that barrier and get natural again. You see it all the time, it’s just . . . open. Like . . .” Earnest and pleased with herself, her bow bent against error, her lips touched with a live coal, she sat on my floor there and did her best to bring me into the twentieth century. She sat back on her braced hands and eyed me, ironic, superior, and ribald. “I don’t know if I should tell you this.”

“I don’t either.”

“Well . . .” Actually she was determined to tell me, she couldn’t have been stopped from telling me any more than some of her kids could be stopped from throwing off their clothes and cleansing the world of its hypocrisy. She bowed her head on her knees so that her hair fell to the floor, she lifted her head and looked at me half smiling through the foliage. “What would you say to something like this,” she said. “Suppose you were at a party where everybody knew everybody else-friends, you know?–and everybody was stoned, and it turned into a gang bang? Suppose four or five fellows banged this girl while everybody else watched. Would that seem crude to you, or dirty, or immoral, or something?”

“I’d have to say we’d come a long way from Grandma.”

She laughed, this lady missionary. “You’re not kidding. But how would you take something like that? It wouldn’t necessarily be crude, or vicious, or anything, would it? They’d just be doing their thing, what they felt. They wanted it and so did she, so they did it. I suppose that shocks you, doesn’t it?”

“Some things offend me. I’m not very easy to shock.”

“But why be offended?” she said, and leaned to hug her knees and fix her wide gray eyes on me. She had quit smiling. She looked, in fact, strained. “Isn’t it just an old-fashioned code that makes you feel that moral disapproval? Once you get rid of that, isn’t a scene like that just as natural as two people going to bed in a dark room? Isn’t watching it sort of like watching a show–Living Theater or something? Who loses anything?”

“It doesn’t sound as if anybody there had much to lose,” I said. “Assuming this really happened. Did it?”

She wagged her head, her chin on her knees. “It happened, yeah.”

“So nobody lost anything. Maybe they even gained something–VD, for example. I understand it’s making a comeback under the modernized rules.”

She shook off that suggestion almost irritably. Her mood had changed within two minutes into something somber and brooding and half angry. “So you
don’t
think it was natural, or like a show or a parlor game.”

I began to wonder if she was talking about herself; I’m still not sure she wasn’t. I said, “Would you take your parents?”

“Oh, wow!”

“Would you talk about it with them?”

“What do you think?”

“But you don’t mind talking about it with me. I’m as old as they are.”

“You’re different. You’re educated, you’ve been around, you’re not buried in the dark ages. I feel I can talk to you. Am I wrong?”

“I hope not,” I said. “But just now you were criticizing me for my dishonest treatment of Grandmother’s sex life.”

“Oh . . . crap,” Shelly said. Clearly I inhibit her more than she admits. “I don’t know. What
do
you think of a scene like that?”

“I think you’re describing a kind of hell,” I said. “You’re talking about people who have become sub-human. Sub-mammal. Sub-worm. I wonder if even bilharzia worms, which are locked in copulation all their lives, ever sit around and watch other bilharzia worms copulate? I think our sickness has gone so far we aren’t even sure it’s sickness.”